WHEN LINHOUSE WAS Avery small Sunday school boy, he had brought home a phrase, dropped from the gravely pale young lips of the girl who taught them, which he had long kept as a peculiarly satisfying one for the declamatory occasions which went on only in his own head. Pandemonium rained. In a distant way he had been aware of its true context, which his private vision of it seemed not to contradict. Pandemonium sank quietly from the heavens, his grandmother’s brown silk umbrella, enlarged to cover all mankind. Rained fell in long, glass chopsticks slanted permanently midair, as in a favorite drawing from the London Illustrated Magazine. The phrase had always seemed to him one of the quietest ones in the language, yet more sinisterly suited to the end of the world than many later ones with more rockets in them. As the auditorium lights swelled on without any help from him, and revealed rows of faces in various stages of that holy quiet of aghastness—it still did. He would not have been surprised, looking up, to see a brown-ribbed tent, sized to this house, this crowd, this—occasion, on its way down.
Pandemonium here, he observed at once—why it must be his duty to observe, no doubt went back to that Sunday school also—would first of all be a contest in silence, not only here, perhaps anywhere. The first to speak would choose a reality; after that, the rest would only be taking sides. So it might have been along the dark, fifteenth-century prados when rumors of a new continent had divided the wine cellars, or at date-palmed oases receiving that tale-bearer—and burying him later?—who said that the Red Sea had rolled. Or, to bring matters forward to a period which better matched this present tender pink light and the surprise it shone on, perhaps that silk-shaded dusk in American clubland—maybe the Union League in Chicago—when it first came over the ticker that a man in machine had flown. For, number eight lights, opera intermission rose-velvet, had once again been chosen.
Meanwhile, he at least was looking out on an audience so selectively of the same impulses, credos, that—barring a bird-squabble or two—it could act admirably in concert. He scanned them. Naturally, those he knew best or had seen before, such as Meyer and Lila, the publicity woman, Anders, various departmental heads and secretaries, nodding acquaintances, stood out as if they were the main cast—no doubt an illusion. Illusion also the platform one—that they were all looking back at him. Elsewhere and through him was where they must be looking; they were all thoughtful persons, and lens-or-television trained. Everybody out there wore the same face—and it was divided. And nobody was bothering to look at the machine.
In the silence—certainly he should be the last man to speak—certain convictions nevertheless came to him.
He had heard of scapegoats, as who here had not, it being the political convention of—that funny little capsule—“our time.” Send Jack. He was not going to be one. They would try.
He ought to look at the women especially, to see whether this soft candlepower was intended, what it was designed to—For (an old-fashioned certainty of one’s own sex might yet come in useful) he’d had a very straight thought indeed. No being whose flesh is trained to cosmetic … ever quite escapes it in the mind.
As he began to scan the women row by row, another thought superseded this one, and pronto. He ought to count them.
Then, in concert indeed, and as if Pandemonium were always succeeded by Babel—everybody began speaking at once.
Out of this, the voice of the provost—when Naughton’s head was bent, as it must have been, that red-faced presence went out like a stoplight—rose responsibly above. “Food for thought—” he said. Alas for authority in high provosts, so often a habit, rather than a content. “Food for thought—” Yes, almost a question.
“Nonsense!” The voice, of a man either slouched in his seat or hidden from sight by his neighbors, rang from the upper rows just below the grand circular aisle of doors. “Nonsense! Riemann!” Was it identifying itself? The voice of prejudice at last, in any case, and Linhouse saw he was not the only one glad to hear it. Why, though, must prejudice always sound so much braver than reason, and often be it? Answer: (and for whom?)—because it is ready to declare.
He should be counting.
Someone near the first speaker interposed, “What’s that again, Charles?” with the mild deafness of a colleague, and Linhouse recognized that the men in this row, plus a few women, sat together in a sort of unity. A department of course, as probably throughout the hall—though he didn’t know which were which.
“We may be only geneticists,” said the hidden Charles, “but though we didn’t read for the tripos, some of us jolly well had to—”
“Riemann, Bernhard,” a third voice drawled, from several rows below the others, off-center. “German, 1826–1866, died at his height, poor fellow.”
The voice, that of a man who was certainly at his—yellow-haired, handsomely ruddy in the oddly hawk-soft way very north North Europeans could be, and of a girth jutting well out from his neighbors—continued, in mock recitation: “Geometry of elliptic or Riemannian space. The Riemannian measure of curvature. And for all you biologists who didn’t go in for the tripos: The inverse square of a certain constant, characterizing by its value—as positive, negative or infinite—the three space forms—that is, elliptic or Riemannian; hyperbolic or Lobachevskian; parabolic or Euclidean. And such that when the sides of a triangle are divided by this constant, there results a system of equations—” The voice returned to its drawl. “Very good, Charles, for thinking of it, go to the top of the class—as you were always doing, when we were at school. But as far as a serious connection with what we’ve been hearing—with this. Uh-uh. Go to the bottom. Afraid it won’t do honey; it just won’t do.”
Well, maybe it wouldn’t. But this speaker had identified himself, at least to Linhouse-honey, as the man who had been in the coffee shop with Lila. The man was sitting so that he had an angled view of her if he wished, and his voice had a vanity in it which might be addressed to her. In the dim past—why did the last two hours make it seem such a dim one?—Linhouse would have been amused to share this, in the way even a non-gossipy man will, with the woman he—but he was counting.
“I don’t know about that, Björnson,” said yet another voice. “I wouldn’t say that. In some ways, even there, we just don’t know.”
At the Center—where was gathered so much more knowledge than the rest of mankind shared, that any dinner party on which the chandelier fell might be a world disaster—to say “one didn’t know” was the proper affectation, though Linhouse had noticed that visiting scientists were affecting this simplicity also—like rich men who never carried a penny in their pockets. But this speaker, a nut-brown Indian of quiet demeanor, who belonged to one of the astrophysical sciences, was remembered by Linhouse, though he’d forgotten his name, as the prime mover in the most interesting table conversation, or any, he’d ever been privileged to have here. In the faculty lunchroom, where tables marked “Single” were carefully kept for those who weren’t clique-minded or—O demokratia—didn’t have one, Linhouse had one day arrived fresh from his seminar in Greek translation, where a routine discussion of adherent meanings, hotly blooming to lively, had set off a knockdown, dragout fight over the ambiguity proper to a work of art. Not as good as the playing fields of Eton of course, but still that circumstance which exhilarates the modest teacher on the sidelines. He couldn’t help mentioning it. “Mathematical ambiguity can be fascinating also,” the Indian had said. “Happens to be something I’m working on. The semantics people have to learn they can’t have ambiguity all to themselves.” For the first time here or anywhere, Linhouse had felt himself to be part of a continuum of intelligence that didn’t divide itself into the familiar separation which so often made him feel below the salt, or apparently didn’t even consider this separation to exist. Indians, of course, when they got into the sciences, often carried something Eastern along with them—look at the discovery of reserpine.
“I found this—little treatise, most fascinating,” said the brown man now. Was he listened to so respectfully only because, to Western eyes even here, his thin, tobacco-leaf face was of the kind that so easily went upward in mystical smoke, or by peculiar ropes. Name rhymed with … no, no wonder they listened; he was that astronomer. “It dovetails with something I’ve been working—I shall very much want to meet its author. I confess, I have no idea who—”
“I have an idea,” said the big blond man, Björnson. Was he looking at Linhouse, or smiling at Lila?
Thirteen. Linhouse lost count again, lulled by the deadly slow rhythm, opposite to Babel’s, in which events were now going, almost as if influenced by the legend just heard, its soothing reminiscences of a world whose longitudinal happenings came one by one. Where else could this happen so, except here among these stately mansions—he shivered. Why else would that apparatus be here? It hadn’t changed in aspect. But as with even the most outré machine, his docile eye had grown used to it. It no longer looked to him like a book but rather more like a record player on the shaggy side, its discs—on a new wavelength or something, but very durable—at halfway. He hated to admit to himself that nevertheless, if necessary, he would make a show of observing it, to deflect any too meaningful observation of him. Only other scapegoat he could think of, except one too afar. Unless: Part Two—to be revealed. Could he bear it? Then he sighed.
“So indeed have—I.” Meyer Spilker’s opening phrase, impeccable Beethoven Fifth. His vox humana voice, such a rich marriage of sociology with a fine record collection, made it hard to disentangle his ideas from his overtones; luckily he would always go on to do it for one. “So do I.” He was looking at Linhouse, surely. And had surely been looking, with a frown, at Lila his wife, so married to Spilkerdom that she might have been born one. Was it possible that while Linhouse, in that dim past of his, had been casting about for a sort of rival, Meyer, already with some notions of his own case, had been—
Fourteen. Calmest face he’d seen yet—and most disturbing. Me imperturbe. Lila!
He lost count again. Many of the women here were unknown even by sight to him; since there were so few on the faculty, these were secretaries and wives he supposed, brought out by the lure of scandal; down front there was a sort of staffer, Miss Apple Pie. Me imperturbe too, and on her, even in this light, it wasn’t becoming. What long, smooth cheeks she had, like a bad Raphael! How could he laugh at such a time—or had he better, Gad, had he better? For it had struck him, under spell of the fairy tales being told here, that if any such mass ascension were ever to be planned, Miss What’shername would certainly be his idea of a Marie.
“What a moral message!” Meyer was standing up. “What a legacy.” He cleared his throat, while Linhouse blessed him. Meyer wasn’t looking at him, or if, for a fleet second, he had been, Linhouse’s image had swiftly gone the way that everything in Meyer’s life did, from his own possible cuckoldry, to a day’s family sailboating—during which, for his children’s sake, and pleasure of course, he would triangulate the horizon—to those Christmas cards on which the current clutch of the darker Spilker houseguests were shown around their fireside above the caption, “Why can’t the whole world be like this!”—and “Merrie Xmas from All Spilkers Seven.” Nothing happened to Meyer but went into his “views,” and then was generously shared out.
“What a memorial!” said Meyer. “Picture you a man so-o dedicated to the difference in races that he spent his whole life learning them. Yet one who in the end concluded we are all the same people, anthropologically dispersed. I myself have heard him call it ‘the unholy diaspora.’ And now, not even before he goes, but so modestly after—he leaves us this cautionary … little tale. Fraser, updated for our time—and perhaps—” Here, Meyer paused and smiled, an anthropologist’s long-view, long-couch smile, “and perhaps, in what is to come, if I know him correctly, perhaps a little Malinowski, updated too. But all to the same purpose, my friends.”
“And what would that be, Rabbi Spilker?”
Lila stared elsewhere, at neither.
“Ah well, Björnson, it’s a personal equation,” said Meyer, turning away from the big blond man to peer at the hidden Charles. “But you biologists should know, of all people. He was saying—” He raised one rawboned arm, a little short in the sleeve. “—Sociological sameness is the death wish, my friends. People are the same—but from the heart.” He sat down.
“Excuse please,” said a new voice, “excuse.” This one came from one of several lower rows which seemed to be devoted, like the tables marked “Single,” to the unassociated, among them a few biochemists who were women, one of these even more representatively a Negro, and the voice’s owner, a heavyset man whose impressively bare skull, Balzac-fringed, Linhouse did not at first recognize.
“Winckler hier, history of science,” the man said. “We historians only arrange, nah? We do not shpecoolate. But in Owstria—we het once a famous man who arrange people, nah?” He paused to put on nose glasses hung to a ribbon, and Linhouse remembered him, nostalgically now, as could happen to even the most casually met, the dullest—the Austrian heavyweight who had been at her elbow when Linhouse had met her. Guess I’m really a white octoroon she said, turning to Linhouse, and once again her charms hit him, blows glancing but sure—to the side of the head, to the belly—and once again he stood there, standing but smitten, his head on grassy banks of perfumed thyme, or ready to lie there any afternoon. Today was her memorial. And not a soul except him was thinking of her.
But he was wrong.
“This disappeared lady,” said Herr Winckler. “When I come here, we hev once or twize, talkings. She is widow, very young, marrit, her husband iss—this is not uncommon, nah?—her father. They spend much time togedder in far places. She play once or twize records she make for him there. A very talented, what you call—mime. But I upserve—” He paused, scratching his chin. “Was it our first talking? Perhaps the second.” The glasses dropped, were replaced, and dropped again—a useful ribbon, a nervous historian. “You will excuse me, you her friends, but in the interests of truth. This was a woman who hev many men possibly, but a not sexual woman.” He scratched again, this time the head. “I upserve this,” he simply. “I.”
“Excuse me, Winckler—” It was the Indian’s Oxonian speech. “Man who arranges people! Most fascinating concept, must say, and must say, most Teutonic way of expressing it. May I take it that you refer to that most illustrious compatriot of yours—?”
Dr. Winckler bowed, but said nothing.
It was the Indian who had to persist. “Our favorite international ambiguist?” he said smiling. “Freud?”
Dr. Winckler parted his mouth widely also, displaying block-teeth of a terrifying innocence. “I hev yet lankuage trouble.” He pointed to the stage. “Too qvick for me. Hab es nicht versteh. But it is really important to listen only to the voice. And to hev met this lady. We het here surely, a most remarkable case of—androgyne.” He surveyed the house. The glasses fell again. “She was—boy.” And he too sat down.
Linhouse stood up. Send Jack. And no wonder.
“She—” The word scratched his throat like a garland. “She—was not.”
And to do them all here gentle credit, this time not a person here laughed. He had just been forced to go through that worst of live dreams: he was a small boy in Piccadilly Circus, no, on the Sunday pulpit in Wiltshire, no, numb on a platform in America here, his private parts exposed. And where, this time, were the clowns, the rooks, the naturals of two hours ago—or was this the question one had always to ask, alternately, of humans? They were quiet, for a moment not in flight from themselves or divided, or if in flight, a flock in migration, who saw, passing beneath them, their own sometime memorial.
Or was this merely the influence of all those women dotted quiet along the rows, especially in the aisle seats and in the last rows, up near the doors? There were certainly—
“Of course not!” This was Björnson, the blond mathematician. “Mr. Linhouse merely speaks for all of us.” His words were grave ones, of no possible offense. He appeared to be vain, probably a man who lived much by sexual prowess, therefore able to speak of such matters without the sneer of tact. “Until Dr. Winckler knows the American scene a little more familiarly, he must reserve judgment on just what we are. That the lady was unusual, one won’t deny—we are here in that memory. I never knew her well—and when I came back after a two-year leave, she was gone. But I can assure Dr. Winckler he could never have made such a statement if he’d known my old friend as I did, in his salad days—and incidentally his salad days went on pretty near forever—our old friend, her husband.”
A permissive smile spread abroad, brief and male only. The exploits of the dead are all decent. Except perhaps to the provost, who half rose, saying, “Gentlemen! There are—”
Ladies present, indeed. And had none of them babies to care for, meals to prepare?
“But if I may just comment on the voice?” said the polite Indian in his own modestly firm, Oxon.-Indo-European one. “Is not the voice of a recording machine of any kind—always homosexual?”
“Gentleme—” The provost rose to his feet, and full voice. “We must all be wanting our suppers. And our wives must be wanting to get home to their chil—” To the children, ours perhaps, but at least theirs. He turned to bow in their direction, and stood, uneasily arrested. When rooks don’t caw, something from overhead—hawks, or large brown pandemoniums—may be expected; did he feel this too? Or when so many women don’t, but sit imperturbable, doll-like in the pinkness, determined to see this opera through.
Or when their direction—good God. Is so very general. There was no need to count. There were such a lot of them. They outnumber us—as the deep South here so often said in another connection. They always did. And in the same connection: But now … they know.
“Then, gentlemen,” said the provost, “—and ladies.” He wasn’t yet crushed, only less florid. “—Then may I have your ideas, as you say, on this extraordinary … I won’t say hijinks.” He drew himself up, having given them his. “And since Mr. Linhouse—can’t say—” (won’t being implied) “also on the origin of this, its authorship. Plus further suggestions for its disposal, and our continuance here.”
“Certainly you may have mine.” Meyer Spilker rose to give it. “That great, great man. That man who—” He thought better of this. “Jamison.” As if to defend, he remained standing.
“Oh—blather and nonsense.” From behind a nest of doll-heads, none of them dowagers, none of them even hatted, the hidden Charles now rose, revealing himself as very long, very thin, and perhaps rather casually knotted together, but not otherwise too bad an example of genetics. And yet young. “Nonsense and—and blather. Nice tribute to a colleague, of course, but if I may say so, to you social science people, everybody who isn’t an aborigine is a middle-middle. There’s not an exact man among you. So of course you never see one. Neither does a biologist like me, but at least he’s aware of it. And I saw Jamison. Talked to him. Heard him in lecture, nice enough old codger, explaining the three intonations of the word “biji” in Navaho—the last one with a wink. Biji, hi-fi, bee-ji. And so on. And the museum of course, jolly respectable achievement. But as for him being the author, or finding some Navaho who was—of that rather sweet little discourse we heard just now? Not ’alf likely. But I’ll tell you just the type that would be, if my friend Björnson will allow. That’s a mathematician’s job-of-work, if ever I saw one. Just the charming sort of larkiness they go in for while they push their nieces about, on the Cam. Or the Isis.” He grinned. “I know a mathematician’s fantasy, when I see one. Always that queerish, maiden-aunt tone to it.” Suddenly he slapped his knee, being so constructed that he was able to do it while almost vertical. “Björnie, of course! Ever remember that thing we read in Philo—My Trip into the 4th Dimension, by A. Square? Written by Clerk Maxwell—I never forgot it.”
“If you mean Flatland,” said Björnson, “I can assure you that was perfectly tidy mathematics. But not by Maxwell, who was by the way a physicist. To him belongeth ‘Maxwell’s demon.’”
“—’s at?”
“A hypothetical elf. He dreamed it up, to show up the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics. Maybe you have something there, about aunties.”
“Okay then, you get the general idea. Björnie, are you sure—? It sounded just like you.”
Björnson rose, very tall as well as wide, taller than Meyer—son of a land with a long midnight. “Thanks for the compliment, or no thanks. But I have—a specific idea. We’d a family friend used to visit us, when I was a boy. Crampton the zoologist, never sufficiently appreciated, taught at some girls’ school over here. But over the years, thanks to him, I got to know a certain prayer rather well. It’s the one you zoo boys still say to yourselves every night, don’t you? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Man as a fetus goes through all the biologic stages, much compressed of course, that the human race did. Right, Charles?”
“Oh, so to speak, but I don’t—”
“Hang on. My sister and I had a private rhyme for the old gent—” Björnson seemed highly excited, and childlike—there were always men who had to quote childhood at the most crucial instances of their grown lives, but Linhouse was surprised to tab Björnson as one of them. “Yes …” Björnson said, “here goes:
The body in Ma’s belly can’t be Us
Until it’s been a fish, a snake, a rat, a bird—
Plus Pithecanthropus!”
He grinned. “Apologies—we were a large family. But all the time I was listening to that thing over, getting itself reborn and so forth, I kept thinking of it. Couldn’t we be listening to a rather remarkable exposit of the fetal dream, and then—remember that part about the door—of a human ego, very early, on its way to sensory experience, to consciousness. Couldn’t we?”
Linhouse fancied he saw Lila’s face shift slightly; was it choosing between blond and dark, husband and lover—or between “views”? Or had it some of its own views now, newly and darkly shared? Shared they would be somehow, by this so American mater dolorosa—who had once worn to the president’s reception (and over red flounces) a hank of watermelon seeds strung by the afflicted children of fourteen nations. In that silly-safe memory, Linhouse relaxed, even sat down again on his chair, even remembered—by an ancient association: women to food—that he was hungry.
“—For—” said Björnson. “We’ve had mention of Fraser, of Flatland, of God knows what all. But what if we’ve been listening to is an allegory, of how a babe in the cradle would report the growth of sense data? A kind of—kind of zoological, psychological Pilgrim’s Progress—and I must say, brilliantly recapitulated!”
Charles gave a great guffaw. “Not by this biologist. We were Church of England.” He sat down, and was at once hidden again.
“Not you, of course not. Be serious.” Björnson turned to face the audience at large. “I am.” He was too, and how the women must take to it, copybook Scandinavian but with an overlay; all the men were so complicated, here. Linhouse sank further in his chair, a backless, folding one, in which a shoulder up since dawn might still find a soft berth somewhere. Committee meetings the world over were always a rerun of Everyman, but here at the Center the all-star cast made them such a, such a … unparalleled … on the eerie side of boredom. He had never fallen asleep at one of them before. Take Björnson-Björnie, not just the stock mathematical type who liked music, though he probably did that too, but one who had also read Jung. A mathe-hmmmm … who liked wmmmmmmm … count them … Who-oooo … ooooooo … OOOOOOO.
At a thwack, which sounded through the hall and his sleep, he opened his eyes, blinking them in time to see that Björnson must merely have clapped his hands together; he was facing the machine now, apostrophizing it. “Not one of us, don’t you see that, all of you? Not one of us!”
Linhouse sat up. Always known it, of course. Not out of Ma’s belly, he wasn’t—not to them, here. In spite of this, his eyes closed again.
Through them, he heard the Indian say silkily, “You mean Us, perhaps, sir? Asia? People often do.”
“No, no, no. I was speaking professionally. Now do listen, all of you, without your personal prejudices. Or rather, with them; that’s the point. Who could have authored this—saga?”
Linhouse opened one eye. A woman—had they at last thought of them? If he were going to be asked again for inside dope, he supposed he’d have to give it. No, definitely. Not Janice. Then he recalled that they were speaking professionally. He could drift off again.
“Charles,” said Björnson. “You … thought it was … me. Or some mathematician. Spilker here, a generous man, thought it was some other anthropologist. Everybody plumped for—”
“Or somebody Jamie studied and then recorded,” said Spilker. “Thinking it over. He was in the South Seas you know—you have no idea how marvelous some of those younger islanders—Western-trained, even doctors. But who keep the links with the old culture, the old stories. Or Australia. Some of it sounds—not cribbed of course—but very like Firth.”
“Yes, yes. And Herr Winckler thought of—well, Freud. I myself thought of psychology for a bit … but then there was old Crampton. Don’t you see it? Everybody plumped for another field—than his own. Now who would do this kind of echo job, except one kind of person? Who else could put together this extraordinarily—this hodgepodge that could make a biologist think of Riemann or Alice in Wonderland, and make somebody who knew the mathematical references—think of Darwin? Who else could catch all this from the surrounding air, and put such a brew to steep—”
Opening an eye, Linhouse watched Björnson push back a blond forelock enthusiastically. Swedes were so romantic in a necrophile way; maybe he’d fallen in love with her posthumously. Janice’s attractions had been so powerful.
Nodding up, nodding down, as if half snoozing at a movie, Linhouse watched the Swede push past seatmates, step over empty seats with his seven-league legs, walk down the aisle toward the stage, and—jump up on it. And here he was.
“Mr. Linhouse—” Björnson walked upstage of him. “You brought the book here, arranged for her memorial. Won’t you tell us? Who else but one kind of person, one person, could have cooked up such a fine stew? Such a naughty one!”
Linhouse saw him—but dimly. No, he heard himself say from afar, or thought he did. Since you ask—no. She couldn’t cook.
Then he saw Björnson’s hand extended to him. Then he stood up. Then he awoke.
“Who—” said Björnson, “but a literary man!”
So. This was not happening to him, to me. Right-here was no longer the average fantastic of beingness; it was active. Linhouse had once been swept off the deck of a friend’s schooner he was helping to crew—no lifejacket, and twenty miles offshore. He remembered, from the trough of that wave. The logic of reality is split, frazzled, left-handed; sometimes a man can deal with it, since so is he. But the logic of unreality is merciless. And gives him time to meditate.
Weakly, he let his hand be shaken, thinking that the Swede, who was still working their joined hands in brother-style, the way emcees introduced guest comics, wanted speech from him. But Björnson, still holding on, was addressing the machine. “A book,” he said. “A book. A book.” He said it once more, tenderly. Biji, biji, biji. Was he going on until the word lost all value except incantation, or perhaps acquired one, as in those schoolyard games where one was told to shout East Pole, East Pole—and found oneself calling for the Police?
“A recording machine in the shape of one; that was the clue,” said Björnson. “Pushed at us so modestly; one can see why. Mr. Linhouse is lucky that his hoax was such an entertaining one. And to be congratulated on his bravery. Palomar! Elliptoids! Gyroscopes—a nice bit of Bishop Berkeley there, eh?” He cuffed Linhouse lightly. “Ah, a mishmash, some of you may say, but I for one applaud the attempt. To remind us. We must not forget the Greeks, must we. To remind us to see the whole hog—even in Hobby Hall.”
And now Björnson put one long arm around Linhouse. “And that’s why we have him here, don’t we?”
In a moment, maybe somebody would say: Rah! Linhouse even waited for it, deep in his own logic. Scapegoats sometimes got out of it, didn’t they, by turning into mascots?
“And you needn’t be ashamed of the job, old boy,” said Björnson. “Martians and supermen—notwithstanding. Why … some of us even thought of the … the old classics … didn’t we!”
The brown man stood up for the first time. Collar up, he seemed not to mind the heat but rather to need it; slung around his shoulders was a muffler the size of a shawl. He was small. Or smaller than Linhouse. Humped under Björnson’s easy arm, Linhouse, a once respectable five-nine, regarded the Indian. Was he an ally? For a hog, his eyes were certainly beautiful.
The Indian’s row was empty. He started to sidle toward the aisle, then thought better of it, and stayed where he was. “From internal evidence alone,” he said. “And perhaps the second part, which we must hear, sirs, we really must—will entirely disperse the ambig … but certainly one point is already clear. Certainly the author of this—whoever it may be—has studied the Rig-Veda.”
Björnson ignored him utterly, smiling only at Linhouse. “Food for thought, eh, Provost? For maybe, some day, the real-and-total job will be done—by one of us.” Under the friendly musculature of his arm, he must at last have felt a certain limpness in his protégé. He removed it, leaving Linhouse with his head still pushed forward from that fraternal arch, hands hanging loosely. Posture was indeed—
Then Björnson poked him. “Second part, eh,” he said under his breath, “juicy, eh; sure like to see it sometime.” Louder he said: “Come now, Mr. Linhouse, release us—we’ve got you cornered, er hmmm. Fess up. Who else hired the hall, made use of the lady’s name, all the rest of it. Who else could it be? Perhaps you’ll explain it otherwise. Can you? And if so, how?” He raised his chin, walking to one side just a flick later; once he must have been in amateur theater.
Oh sloth, thought Linhouse. Oh the three-toed sloth, does it never let go one toe, two, and then—For he felt himself to be such a sloth as only meant to fall—or rise? Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. He stared at the machine, where. resided somewhere, though automated, his own passion for Milton. He might ask it. What may I plump for, in my field, in my profession? Reel back movie-style, O great tumble of literature, as these fresh boys speak of doing with the universe? Not that easy. The mixture—so … mixed. Once, one would have spoken up, and automatically—for the human. Couldn’t be done, could it be done, any more. No, he wouldn’t be the one to do it; but he wouldn’t apologize, either.
He stared at the machine, runt to runt. That’s my guess, who wrote it, he could say to them. I was right in the beginning. He nodded to it. A person from out of town. At last he opened his mouth—such a squeak!—and spoke to it. “I think, what we heard—” But he must speak to—them. Turning up his palms, he did so. “I think—That it’s true.”
And now fall upon me, he thought—on me, Molly Martyr. But first, you bloody fools—count the women.
There was a clatter then, and a roar, but not from the multitude. What was jostling over its neighbors in the loge, pushing past them over stepped-on ankles, banged knees, and coming down the aisle, past the hidden Charles, past Herr Winckler’s resolute eyeglass and the visiting Indian—into the pit? A strange ally, the last one Linhouse would have thought to find in his corner—who’d have thought it of the egg, and was it cause for elation?
For as Tippy Anders came on, abang and agawk, perhaps yelling was a better word than roar. His young-old voice strained with its first-or-last attempt at vehemence. The head however, that huge infant, cradled itself like a crown jewel, balanced serene above the bumble beneath it, in a separate cottonwool of air. He reached the pit without Linhouse having been able to make out his message, and stood there touching his chest—gathering his forces down, as—it were?—until he could speak plain.
“True?” he said then. “True?” and the word as he said it scared Linhouse as it never quite had, before. It went up as wandering as anybody might say it—as a child or a granddad, or a mute painting it to send up on a balloon. “Of course it may be, in true’s way,” said Anders. “I haven’t got time for—that kind of thinking. It isn’t that I don’t honor it of course; I just haven’t got time.” He shrugged. The head balanced above it. One could see why, when still over its milk and cereal, but already setting out on implosions which might someday limit the time of others, a confused family circle might have nicked it with the name Tippy. “Martians?” he said, and shrugged again. “Some kind of life there, I suppose. Not my part of the—not what I—” Hand in pocket, he considered. “Not my beckyar-r-d,” he said, in his crimped upstate New Yorkese, and one saw it, dark and not his, on a field of stars scattered wide. “But if Mr. Björnson is disputing that there’s life of a kind—maybe even this kind—somewhere, I’d like to ask him one question.” He turned bodily, head following. “What makes Björnson think—he’s one of us?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. One slender, Humpty-Dumpty arm and hand extended toward the apparatus. From where he was in the pit, he of course couldn’t touch it. And the Object, or whatever one must call it, remained—inanimate. But an exploratory—field? or feeling?—hung for a moment in the air between them; perhaps it was only one’s own idea, very elementary, of antennae retracting, of a gap—between anode and cathode—not jumped. “I wonder,” he murmured, so low that only pit and stage could be frightened by the wonder of his wonder. “Sure like to take that thing upstairs and have a look at it—when I’ve time.” Then he too addressed the audience, the head tilting meanwhile quite comfortably; if it never counted persons, why should it count women? “From the evidence. If Mr. Linhouse did write that business, he’s had some very sophisticated coaching. And I—” His face, set in the head as if just emerging from it, struggled. Yes, it could do; it had an expression, a small and beleaguered one, too. Something was missing from that face—the glasses! Yet it seemed able to see, quite well. Were those great goggles only that very special defense crystal—clear glass? If true—only in true’s way of course—one could see why; the whole world knew that Anders was only twenty-three. “And I’m kind of—sure, from what quarter he got it.” He was staring down into the pit. “I’m not interested in what kind of life,” he said sullenly, like a boy not taking a dare. “Who? What? … That’s for later … and it’s not my—” If he was going to say backyard again, then perhaps the world should scream at him and hurry, the one scream it would likely be allowed. “My job is where, send them and get them! My job is the signals themselves.” For a moment, the head, with its face, rode on the current of this, comforted. Then Anders put his glasses back on.
Maybe this is the real, the best candidate, thought Linhouse. For mutation. This nihil, floating blind but intelligent behind its clear non-glasses, its fontanelle winking and ready for: anything.
Anders was still staring down in the pit. He spoke to it. “Water in a liquid state,” he said, in deep disgust. “Universal biochem—and so forth. We know all that. We know what you others—and more power to you. But why one of us should take a position that might be contrary to you, to every—” He leaned over, until it was seen that he was really addressing another head, sunk on its neck and so low in the shadows that everyone here had forgotten it. “Collaborate if you want to, on that kind of—of fancywork! Maybe you’ve got time for it.” He sounded like an angry merchant-father, whose son wanted to go into art. “That’s your business. What you’ve been doing with my facilities I don’t know, but you might have asked for the loan of them. But there’s one thing we don’t have to listen to here, not from you, nor Harwell nor the Sternberg, not from anywhere.” He pointed at the machine. “—and not from there.” He drew himself up. “Not here at Hobbs we don’t, not in America. We have not been excelled. Not on evidence as yet, and I say not likely to be. And you ought not to—” He faltered, gulped. “And you ought to remember it.”
Then the ass grew ears indeed, the great head became no more than a Thanksgiving pumpkin giving thanks for itself. Not just “one of Us,” thought Linhouse. Also, just—and very lowercase, too, billy-boy. Just one of us.
Below, in the pit, that other head didn’t move.
Then poor Anders leaned over the edge of the stage. “Sir Harry? Sir Harry! Good God, hope I haven’t done anything to—Sir Harry, sir!”
Three things happened then, according to Linhouse—he having much taken to this style of separating events from each other.
The machine ruffled itself, with a premonitory trembling of all its discs.
The head in the pit raised itself also. It was an elderly gentleman, who had been asleep. It was a former staff member, emeritus and retired to the neighborhood, who attended anything and everything public. It was not Sir Harry.
From above the crowd, beyond the seats, from apparently that corridor of gently encircling doors—a voice answered.
Linhouse closed his eyes again. High in the back wall of the auditorium, there was the usual projection window—or so it looked to be. Would it open now to display Sir Harry’s naked, well-set old bones as Father Time, or on a cushion, lotus-crossed? But there was really no time for brooding. When he opened his eyes, Sir Harry was merely at the top of the center aisle, still dressed in nothing more unconventional than the costume he must have considered suited to California—yachting jacket, and those white flannel bags.
All faces turned back and up, of course. No. All the male ones. And now surely, one must believe. For the other faces remained forward, like dolls in a shop at night perhaps, who could move but wouldn’t bother, knowing their morning destiny—or else awaited the tink-a-tink of a magic churn. Yes, there was one of them peeping, but perhaps she was doing it professionally—Miss Publicity Pie. What clever fascisti could have trained up the women this way? Answer: us.
“Yes, Anders,” said Harry, “what is it I mustn’t say?” He came a step or so forward. “Fear I had nothing to do with this, except—perhaps as we all have—to have stood aside. And whoever tampered with your facilities, Mr. Anders—you’ve only my word of course—it wasn’t me. As for Mr. Linhouse’s role in all this; I shouldn’t be surprised, Jack, if—you’ve been had. Or—what’s it your gangsters always say—in your newspapers?”
Linhouse said it softly to him. “We wuz framed.” Not loud enough. But at least he’d warned this crowd.
“Either way,” said Sir Harry mildly, “I have to claim my right to say what I think again, Anders. For: we HAVE been. Excelled, don’t you know.” He paused. “Will no one quote Voltaire?”
Meyer, in a mumble, obliged. “Hatewhatyousaydefendt’deathyourrightt’sayit.”
“Thank you,” said Sir Harry. “Ordinarily, that breaks up most any meeting very satisfactorily. But I fear I have some even more unpleasant information for us, though I dislike alarming the ladies.” He stopped, reflective—“So many ladies!”—and went on. “Anders? … Anders—” and again he didn’t wait for reply. “I do rather fancy we may have been, don’t you know. Every one of those doors up there has been sealed.”
There was a rush to them then of course—by whom and whom not, Linhouse had no need to look up and see. Alone on the stage again, or nearly so, Björnson and Anders having rushed up there also, he was thinking of the London Underground where he and his mother and older sister and her three girl friends had once been caught for many hours during the blitz. He was thinking of the one bathroom here, at the end of the passage which debouched on the door backstage in the wings, just behind him. And he was thinking of the long line of spike-heeled hysterics who after a while, training or no, would have to be led down that passage—unless more anatomical change had already gone on here than he imagined. Or unless—He didn’t really believe in the end of his world, or that it was happening here—but there was no doubt that in his world the big doings hung by the little ones. Unless—he then said to himself silently—unless, mammas to the end: they would lead him. He jumped up, tried to run backstage—and got no further. Where the wing sections had been, two curved heights of wall, solid from boards to the ceiling, had slid into place on either side of the stage.
He was just in time to join his report of this to that of the group of men now returned to the pit. It seemed that the doors, whether electro-magnetically sealed or jammed, were immovable and made of the heaviest plastic, not of anything as frangible as old-fashioned stone. There were no phones here. To this he could contribute that, as far as a mind humbly unused to Gauss’s logarithm could calculate on its own, then they were now in a hermetically sealed dome. Within it, he looked around. Except perhaps for that phalanx out front, row after row of them—or even with them—things still looked remarkably friendly. Or at least in good taste.
In the pit, all the men who had spoken were gathered, plus a few others—all except the Indian, who sat in his shawl as if it concealed other resources.
“What’ll we do?” said the rest of them, rather similarly, although one looked at the ceiling, and one—Charles—was testing the floor with a fingernail.
Sir Harry, coming down the aisle, arrived among them.
“What’ll we do?” they said to him.
Sir Harry looked at Anders, who blushed, though it only yellowed him more.
“Do?” said Anders. “Hear it—that thing—through, of course. If it is … anything … If they’re like us—and they will be—they’ll expect us to.”
Sir Harry nodded solemnly. He had never underestimated Anders.
“Hear it out, what else?” Anders repeated. Chick or egg, he knew which part of him came first. “That’s obviously what’s been programmed.”
And at that, as if his remark were part of same, the lights began to go down altogether.
“Oh no, no, really not,” Sir Harry said mildly. “That’s not necessary.” Raising his arms in what was already twilight, he looked as if he were about to start a last late race in the regatta at Cowes. “Not in the dark,” said Sir Harry.
Could he be afraid of that too? Linhouse stirred. O nursemaids—and O policemen, everywhere. Oh believe in the unknown; it will ennoble us. Not that it has any obligation to. Or need.
But he had one. Really, it was his duty. “Look to the women!” he cried at last, then heard its ambiguity. “Damn you, will you look at all the—”
Behind him, came a glow—angels? Great hoptoads fiery? Grand ellipses, pinkly visible? Kings, beleaguered archangels up from your gambreled towns—or down? “—strike!”
God damn, thought Linhouse—We made a poem. He turned.
The television screen, vast as any cinemascope, was lit softly. At first, nothing played there; then, some large letters were dragged across it wrong-end first, so that they saw—“ou!” only; then, as if filmed by a director ignorant of projection, or one who knew only Hebrew, the direction of these was quickly reversed. The letters themselves weren’t smartly cut, nor arty, nor even hop-skip-and-a-jump cartoon. The best that could be said of them was that they could be the work of a gifted aborigine. They were large enough to fill the screen, and raggedly simple. They said, “THANK YOU.”
And then they went out.
And now we’re all in the dark together, Linhouse thought. And nobody’s screamed yet—unless one could count mine.
A number of hollow words now became flesh to him. He saw the function of committees. He understood politics—which latterly, had seemed to him not a serious subject. He felt what murder might feel like in the vein, and the asphyxiations—in a small dark space—of a poet like Poe. A locked door made all the difference.
Beside him, a voice spoke up, so tweedly soft that at first he mistook it for the mechanical wind-up of the machine—on whose pile of unplayed disc pages he imagined the topmost one rising.
It was the secretary, who had all that time sat, numb as her sisters, on her chair beside it. Was she real? Her whisper reassured him. “I wonder if he’s coming back,” she whispered. “That li’l ole e-llipse. Sho’ hope so. He was real cute.”
Linhouse didn’t answer. Whether she was real, and from the tender land she talked like, or whether she would shortly fall from her chair in china bits or in pinch-me dream-stuff, no longer interested him. Of women, he was sure of it, he now thought nothing—or, nothing he had ever thought before.